Read with interest Nick Welsh's opinion piece about the issue of the proposal to increase the number of launches from Vandenberg . One aspect the piece did not cover is the increasing awareness by airlines, ocean transport companies, and others, of the costly dislocations caused by the increase in commercial space launches that require alterations to flight patterns or shipping lanes over and around restricted launch areas.
I worked back in the day in the U.S. Department of Transportation's Office of Commercial Space Transportation that evaluated applications from launch companies to receive licenses for commercial space launches (i.e., non-governmental launch companies and customers) from U.S. launch sites. My academic work continues to focus on the space debris issue and the inflection point of commercial companies now dominating the orbital realms.
Airlines and shipping companies in general did not complain when the U.S. government was the launch provider of payloads for the U.S. national interest. Now, though, the motive is bottom-line profit for commercial companies such as SpaceX, and the dislocations caused by launch windows to airlines and others add to their costs.